Fighters Uncaged (Video Game Review)

There are bad video games and then there are really bad ones. But clearly any of them are more entertaining than this painful, anger-encouraging brawler, Ubisoft’s Fighters Uncaged. This game is so bad that you might find yourself in excruciation over the $50 you spent on it. In the game, you play an up-and-coming fighter put into an “impossible odds” situation, forced into an underground fighting circuit in an attempt to save his dad from the guy running the place. And, surprise, he’s got a legion of fighters backing him up, assuring that you’ve got a fight on your hands before you ever reach him. That is, IF you have the patience to reach him. Before you even get started in this guy’s tournament, you have to go through a tutorial session that feels almost like an eternity to get through. You’ll go through each of these moves three times in succession before moving on, turning the fight for vengeance into an exercise in tedium. No, seriously, even if you skip one, there are like three dozen or so to go through before you even get to a real battle.

But surprise, the actual tournament isn’t worth it either. Once you do enter the underground ring, you’ll face all sorts of fighter stereotypes, using the moves you just learned. None of these guys offer any of the diversity or style as, say, any given opponent from Punch-Out. You simply fight back to your best ability and move on to the next nameless guy. The biggest problem with Fighters Uncaged is that you’ll be battling the game’s controls more than the opponents. Most of the time, the moves don’t register correctly, resulting in an accidental “double punch” or, worse yet, a dodge that doesn’t register at all, leaving you wide open for an unfair attack by your opponent. They don’t exactly strike with the greatest of aggression, due to a dull AI set-up, but still, we expected the game to react better than this. We’ve seen better reactions out of drunken people. Worse yet, you can’t take on friends. Fighters Uncaged doesn’t support any kind of online play, nor can you fight alongside a friend.

It’s all one person only, and considering the lack of challenge lying before you in the single-player campaign, you’ll get tired of it in a matter of minutes. One would think that a fighting game would have an inspired design, but, again, Fighters Uncaged failed us. The visuals are completely lifeless, resembling something we’d see out of a first-generation game on the PlayStation 2. The characters are poorly designed, the animations are incredibly stiff, and the venues don’t offer much diversity at all. The sound is equally sleepy, with twangy background music and the kind of taunts you’d expect to hear from would-be bikers in Utah or something along those lines. These guys don’t sound like real toughs at all. Honestly, Fighters Uncaged simply isn’t worth breaking a sweat over. You’d be better off facing a real challenge, like trying to play Super Street Fighter IV one-handed or trying to play the boxing game in Kinect Sports blind-folded. No one should subject himself or herself to the pain of Fighters Uncaged. Avoid it.